Mercury – The Winged Messenger

So… yes, Mercury!

NASA just released their new pictures of Mercury. The Messenger (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) space craft, launched back in August 2004, got into orbit around Mercury 17th March and has finally sent back its pictures. This is the first time a craft has gotten into orbit around Mercury. Mercury is a weird-ass planet; it is incredibly dense, containing a metallic core. The exact composition is unknown. Up until now, only 45% of the planet has been observed, getting the Messenger probe into orbit around the planet means being able to observe the rest of it. Other interesting quirks include the fact that Mercury, like Earth has a magnetic field (other planets, Venus and Mars do not); the Messenger mission aims, amongst other things, to determine why this is the case.

From a physics point of view, getting a satellite into orbit around Mercury is a bit of a faff because just aiming a spaceship at Mercury would simply lead to the craft being pulled into the sun. To get around this, the Messenger spacecraft performed a couple of flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury, in order to slow the craft down enough to get it into orbit around Mercury. It’s basically been corkscrewing its way to Mercury:

So yeah – NASA just posted the first photos 😀

The Schiensh of Bond: Goldfinger

22 months, 22 Bond movies – hang on as we continue with The Incredible Suit’s BlogalongaBond ride!

Goldfinger, arguably, is where James Bond hits his stride, complete with gadgets, girls and over-the-top – occasionally stupid – death scenes. Goldfinger: Murder By Overly-Elaborate Death.

Shocking. Positively Shocking

Bond takes out his would-be assassin by shoving him into a full bathtub and throwing in an electrical heater. Everyone knows that water and electricity don’t mix – why, you ask?

Interestingly – water, the in its purest H2O form is a very poor electrical conductor. The water molecules don’t carry any charge; electricity is defined as “the movement of charged ions” (according to my A-level physics notes). Therefore, in its purest form, water doesn’t conduct electricity. Having said that, water almost always has stuff dissolved in it – usually minerals. Water is a very good solvent for dissolving things, things that dissociate to charged particles – known as ions. These dissolved ions can carry electrical charge, and because of this, most of the time water is a good conductor.

When someone gets electrocuted, the electricity has to get past the skin. Skin’s not a bad insulator and provides a small amount of protection. What is a good conductor is salty water, and a pretty big percentage of the human body is water (about 65%), and various salts: sodium, calcium and potassium ions, are dissolved in this. This ability of bodily fluids to conduct electrical current is pretty important – this is what keeps your heart beating, keeps your lungs breathing and is the very lifestuff of your brain.  If a plugged in piece of electrical equipment comes into contact with water, which carries electrical current and makes good skin contact with someone in the bath, it will cause an electrical shock. In the US, domestic power supply from the mains is 120V (in the UK it’s 240V). So we’re talking about probably 120V, a large area of skin, so the electrical current will reach the heart: the poor dude thrown into the bath tub probably died of cardiac arrest – this means the coordinated pattern of electrical excitation that keeps the heart beating has been disrupted. So, he’ll go into muscle spasms for a bit until his brain stops working due to lack of oxygen.

Skin Suffocation

Bond comes round after being knocked out to find Jill Masterson covered in gold. It’s a rather iconic death, but the gaffaws you get in response to the term “skin suffocation” amongst biologists are almost deafening.

” She died of skin suffocation.  It’s been known to happen to cabaret dancers. It’s all right provided you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to allow the skin to breathe.”

That is utterly absurd. Humans do not breathe through our skin, nor is their a need for the skin to breathe for survival. This is a massive pile of cackwaffle. Mammals including humans breathe through our lungs – they are specially adapted for gas exchange. Air goes into the lungs, diffuses into the blood and is then transported around the body. Rather clever really. If skin suffocation is really a problem, way more people would die scuba diving. Think about that.

The gold paint myth was actually tested in an episode of Mythbusters. They tried it twice. The first time they took baseline readings of temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation and tested Jamie Hyneman skin for sensitivity to the gold latex paint and then entirely covered him in the paint. Once covered in the paint he claimed to feel a bit weird. Shirley Eaton, who played Jill Masterson also confessed to feeling odd – like she was about to be ill. Jamie said much the same thing, his blood pressure increased and he said parts of him felt hot and other parts cold. The doctor on the show suggested that this might be a flight-or-fight response (blood pressure becomes raised in preparation to run or fight). It was also pointed out that sweating via the skin is the main method by which the body loses heat: if the body is unable to cool itself down this can lead to heat stroke, if body temperature remains high, the process that keep you alive become disrupted and can lead to coma and death. But this didn’t seem to correlate with what happened to Jamie. The doctor reckoned that leaving just one small bare patch on the lower back would probably not affect this heatstroke problem.

Mythbusters second attempt at the skin suffocation myth involved coating Adam Savage in gold latex paint – this time they left the patch of bare skin at the base of the back, but Savage didn’t suffer changes in blood pressure in the same way that Jamie did.

Skin suffocation aside, toxic substances used on the skin can cause problems; the Elizabethans suffered from slow painful deaths as their make-up contained lead. Interestingly, Buddy Ebsen, who was cast to play the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz was hopitalised as a result of breathing in the aluminium powder in the make-up he was covered in.

Killer Bowler Hat

This killer bowler hat belongs to Auric Goldfinger’s most iconic henchman, Oddjob. Though I suspect this isn’t his real name. The bowler hat is steel rimmed, and if we are to believe the evidence at the golf club, can cut through solid marble. I don’t know about you, but I’ve tried hacking apart rocks with a bread knife. It doesn’t work, I just end up with a blunt knife and a tired arm. Oddjob’s pretty strong though, he can crush a golf ball with his hands. Luckily for us, Mythbusters have tested this one too. Although they were able to knock the head off a plaster statue with a steel-rimmed bowler hat, and with the help of a hat throwing robot, decapitate a hollow marble statue, the most solid statue made of concrete could only be chipped. But it seems to me that death by steel-rimmed hat, as suffered by Tilly Masterson would be possible; Oddjob’s hat breaking her neck.

Is this possible? Consider that the amount of force required to break a human neck: according to the amusingly-named KGB answers page this is 168 Newtons (I can’t verify this though). From studiously taking notes during Mythbusters, I was able to glean the following. The hat brim, as a rough estimate based on a brim width of 5 cm, thickness of 0.5 cm, and the hat itself being about a foot wide would weigh perhaps 1.5 kilos (based on the density of steel being 7800 kilos per cubic metre). The hat-fliging machine used in Mythbusters was recorded as throwing a hat at 54 feet per second. I work in metric, so that’s 16 metres per second, over 2 metres. According to Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration. I’m assumning 16 metres per second is the average velocity over 2 metres, given the hat is accelerated from an initial speed of zero; so let’s double it to get the speed at which the hat hits the statue: 32 metres per second. That still gives us an acceleration of *math scribbling noises* 205 metres per second per second (acceleration = change in velocity divided by twice the distance covered). As force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration, the force with which the hat hits the statues in the Mythbusters’ experiment is 307 Newtons. Approximately. Which would probably be enough to break Tilly Masterson’s neck. The hat didn’t decapitate her because it would have had to slice through the muscles and soft tissues of her neck, whereas the statues were stiff material and more brittle.

Incidentally, Delta Nine Nerve Gas is Fatal

Auric Goldfinger’s fiendish plan is to poison everyone in the area of Fort Knox with Delta Nine nerve gas so that he can break in and make all the gold in Fort Knox radioactive; thus increasing the value of the the gold in the rest of the world. The fictitious Delta Nine is effective when dispersed from the air, much like other nerve agents. And also in a boardroom when attempting to weasel out of paying your business partners.

Nerve gases come up reasonably often on film (my personal favourite is The Rock; just think of it as a James Bond sequel :D). They contain organophosphates, idea behind them is that they disrupt the normal way that nerves control muscles. They prevent uptake of the neurotransmitter acetylecholine. Generally death is caused by blocking messages from the phrenic nerve (which controls breathing) getting to the diaphragm, the victim can’t breath and suffocates. The effects of nerve gases can be reversed by using drugs that block the action of acetylcholine (like atropine – which is the poison in deadly nightshade). Of course, in Goldfinger, Pussy Galore switches the canisters, so everyone in or around Fort Knox survives.

It’s very dangerous to fire guns in planes

In the final showdown, Goldfinger, along with his “does Scaramanga know you’ve got that” golden gun, takes one last shot at killing Bond. He’s probably still sore over that golf game. On the subject of guns and planes, Bond had previously explained to Pussy Galore:

“That’s a Smith and Wesson forty-five.  If you fire it at this close range, the bullet will pass through me and the fuselage like a blowtorch through butter.  The cabin will depressurise and we’ll both be sucked into outer space together.”

In the struggle that ensues between Bond and Goldfinger, the gun gets fired and the bullet goes through a window, Goldfinger gets sucked through the window. Bond doesn’t. His grip on a rail prevents him from being sucked out of the plane. This being sucked out of an airplane during airplane decompression is a much used device in TV and film; examples include CSI: Miami and Con Air. This has also happened in real life. Why does this happen? Air pressure.

Air pressure is lower the higher you go. I estimate that the plane is cruising around 17,000 metres. At 17,000 metres air pressure is 10 kilopascals. Which is one tenth the air pressure at sea-level, and, as cabin pressure in an airplane would, presumably, be kept at the sea-level air pressure of 101 kilopascals, the air pressure inside the plane is about ten times the air pressure outside the plane. When the window is broken, air rushes out of the plane, as pressure attempts to equalise with that outside the plane.  Anything not firmly held in place would be sucked towards the open window, including Auric Goldfinger. Assuming he wasn’t too fat to go through the window. The low air pressure outside the plane also results in one tenth the amount of oxygen available at sea-level; anyone exposed to such low oxygen levels for long enough would asphyxiate – pass out and die. But I doubt that one minute of low oxygen – the time from the window being shot and the time the plane crashes into the sea – would be long enough to kill Goldfinger. The impact however, probably would.

So, despite close calls with lasers, golden guns and atomic devices, Bond survives to reappear in Thunderball, when Schiensh will return, next month…

Supermoon – Perigee!

On Saturday 19th March 2011, the moon reached perigee – the point in its orbit at which it is closest to the Earth, in fact it’s the closest it has been in almost 20 years – 221,565 miles (356,577 kilometres). According to the NASA site, pretty much the only thing this will do is raise tides by a couple of centimetres. Robert Massey did the rounds over the past week telling everyone that, yes it’s very cool. No, it’s not been causing earthquakes.

I took photos of the full moon on January 19th, and last night, both photos were taken between 9.30pm and 11.30pm at the same location, with quite similar elevation. The only difference is that the shutter speed was slower on last night’s picture, so the “supermoon”, on the left, looks brighter. Here’s my attempt at showing the difference in size between January’s full moon and last night’s perigee moon. Supermoon is just a smidge bigger.

Why the BBC might be right to turn down music on Wonders of the Universe

Please don’t throw rotten vegetables at me, but the backlash the BBC are facing – via complaints and on Facebook – has got me thinking. Perhaps the BBC have a point: maybe the soundtrack to Wonders of the Universe is too loud.

I am a soundtrack whore – I love a good loud soundtrack. Seriously. Do you know how loud I play the music from Sunshine!? The score of that film and many others (Inception, Moon, Star Wars, The Social Network, The Shawshank Redemption, Gladiator, Lord of the Rings, the James Bond movies, anything by Ennio Morricone or Danny Elfman…) are so important. A soundtrack creates ambience and evokes emotional responses. A case in point? John Murphy’s Adagio in D minor from Sunshine. And one of the brilliant things about Wonders is its ability to evoke that “Wow” response. I’m not complaining – not only is Professor Brian Cox probably single-handedly saving the future of physics, he might even be saving curiosity-driven research. Which is all good.

The BBC claim that they received 118 complaints from people saying that they could not hear Cox’s narration over the music. The BBC responded by remixing the rest of the series so that the music is quieter while Cox speaks. Brian Cox’s response to being questioned by Andrew Marr on Start the Week was that the BBC were too responsive to these complaints. He stated that:

“We can sometimes be too responsive to the minority of people that complain.”

He added: “It should be a cinematic experience – it’s a piece of film on television, not a lecture.”

And having read some of the complaints, they do come across as rather fuddy-duddy-ish (from the BBC):

One viewer complained to Points of View: “You don’t have to dumb everything down by pretending we’re all in a nightclub.”

Another wrote: “I am fully able to sort out the annoying cacophony of sounds to hear the narration but why on earth should I have to work so hard to do it?”

From the piece by AOL TV – also apparently a bunch of miserable old sods who don’t like TV trying to be modern, or this cool young upstart physicist with his haircut and lack of old-man beard:

The viewer complaints were endorsed by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. He’s Master of the Queen’s Music and is waging a campaign against the insidious creep of “muzak”.
Sir Peter said: “Viewers of this programme have not tuned in to listen to a musical performance. I find the whole thing dreadful. Why do serious scientists and programme-makers feel the need for such wallpaper? It really does come to something when even a science programme is being drowned out by muzak.

“We are being driven from even serious television programmes by this incessant need for background music. I remember having to turn off an otherwise fascinating David Attenborough wildlife programme because some muzak moron had decided it was a good idea to play background music to the animals’ antics. It just made the whole thing ridiculous.”

“In my day, we had no such need for music… or colour, or in fact, the universe. We didn’t need things like the Big Bang. When I was a lad.” I’m clearly paraphrasing here. But you know what, oh ye complainers of music: you are really not helping yourselves here.

Slightly better complaint:

On the BBC website, one viewer wrote: “Yet again a programme we have been looking forward to utterly ruined by music that drowns out the words. Why does the BBC think its viewers need to have every second filled with noise? We haven’t got the attention span of a gnat.”

The Royal National Institute for Deaf people have also weighed in and they were actually constructive:

“We welcome the BBC’s decision to lower the level of background music on the Wonders of the Universe, which will make this already dramatic and engaging programme more accessible and enjoyable for people with hearing loss. Background noise on news and factual programmes, in particular, is very challenging for hard of hearing viewers and reducing its impact will delight many people with hearing loss.”

This is actually a pretty important when you consider the following – hearing loss is the most common disability in the UK, the most common form is age-related hearing-loss:

A total of 41.7% of over 50 year-olds in the UK have some kind of hearing loss.

Of over 70 year-olds in the UK, a total of 71.1% have some kind of hearing loss.

These percentages include the full range, from mild hearing loss all the way up to profound deafness.

Stats courtesy of the RNID website.

Which means most of us will likely suffer from some sort of hearing loss. This is where I put my research hat on and my cards on the table: I work on the genetics of deafness. One of the things noticed by people with hearing loss is the inability to focus on someone talking in a room full of chatter – the so-called “Cocktail party effect”. In fact, the ability to discern one voice from background noise is how the RNID website and iPhone app hearing check test works. Normally, your brain is able to filter conversation from background, but the louder the background noise, the more difficult it is to hear the conversation. Our ears are sensitive to frequency (pitch) and sound intensity (volume), the amazing little cells in our ears are exquisitely sensitive to pitch, and so through the complex processing pathways within our brains, we can discern a speaker from the background music. That is until the background music is louder than the narrator. As we age, these sound sensitive cells gradually die, and we lose our ability to discriminate speech from the din.

To put it visually it looks like this:

The black line represents the background noise or music. In the box on the left-hand side, the background noise (depicted in black) is low and the green line (the narration) can be easily picked out. In the right-hand image, the background is noisier and the green line, the narration, isn’t as large and isn’t as distinct as in the first image.

Another example, below, is basically the same processing done by the brain, but in the visual system. In the left-hand image, the background is dark and the writing is bright – the equivalent of the background music being quiet and the narration being loud. In the right-hand box, the background is almost as bright as the writing in the box, so the writing is more difficult to read – this is similar to trying to listen to dialogue with a loud musical soundtrack in the background.

As we age, and, in most cases, our hearing deteriorates, it becomes more difficult to identify the dialog from the background. This can be a real problem. Considering the large number of people who develop some form of hearing loss, it’s probably no bad thing that the BBC has been looking into this. It’s all very well jumping on a “We want our background music back” bandwagon, but for those who are actually suffering because they are unable to hear the dialogue in Wonders there is nothing they can do during the programme. Simply turning up the TV volume increases the volume of the background noise too, and so the problem of not being able to hear the Professor Cox remains. This is not only an issue for Wonders; the BBC is looking into this for other TV shows as well.

However, I have re-watched the offending episode of Wonders and didn’t notice anything, but then I have no problems with my hearing. I spoke to my Dad (who is the first person to complain about the volume of the TV, he commented on his inability to hear what’s going on in The Sarah Jane Adventures) and he also had no problems with the show. So it passed the Papa-lemur-old-git test.

Did the BBC go too far? Possibly. Is Professor Brian Cox right to criticise the BBC for its actions? Probably. Is it just miserable old farts complaining about loud music? More than likely.

I’ll leave you with the comments of Danny Cohen, controller of BBC1, who wrote a very good response. One of the most interesting points was this:

“Reducing the music by just one point, four decibels, when the programme is finally mixed allowed many more people to understand what was being said without compromising the editorial vision.

This was particularly true for people who had any form of hearing loss.”

Spam Challenge – Best. Spam. Ever.

I got this in my spamspam filter for the blog. I thought it was absolutely fricken hilarious. Though, because it is a massive pile of bullcrap, I am removing the trackback…

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: post your spammiest and dumbest of your blog spam!

Here’s my contribution:

Alex Collier has been in contact with an ancient alien race. They are called the Andromedans from the constellation of Andromeda. He has had regular contact since he was eight years old. These Extraterrestrials are human looking but are very highly advanced. We are the Genetic Ancestors of many Galactic Human Races. We were originally created as a slave race by an ancient Reptilian race called the Annunaki in order to mine Monatomic Gold in order to extend there lifespan. Galactic Human DNAwas genetically spliced with the Earths Hominids producing Homo Sapiens. Alex Collier outlines the true history of Planet Earth and describes the various alien races including the Greys from Zeta Reticula 2 ( Dows ). He also describes the past Ecological disasters which have regularly reduced mankind to starting from scratch. He also explains that the Universe is a Multiverse made up of many Planar levels. At present we are on the bottom floor but are due to move higher in frequency on to the next plane of existence in 2013. These levels where created by God the Creator using Scienceand have a logical system of evolution and progression. Many races have gone through this evolution in the past. Great Alex Collier Website with true Earth history at …..

(It’s a trackback from someone’s blog – almost as hysterical as Scientology imho)

I got this in response to my Nuclear Power post. I love you batshit trolls!

#1 by crisismaven on April 5, 2011 – 21:19

Well all these high priests preach a gospel that’s missing the point entirely:
The only questions you need ask your governments to end the nightmare for good are here:
http://crisismaven.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/how-i-brought-down-the-nuclear-industry-in-my-country-and-how-you-can-do-it-in-yours/

Think someone needs their tinfoil hat adjusting

James Watson – “I worry about getting shorter”

So, the great thing about working at a prestigious research institute that is obsessed with genetics is that we get some great speakers; this time it was James Watson. You don’t know who that is, do you? For those uninitiated in the ways of the science nerd – Watson won the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine with Francis Crick (a Northamptoner) and Maurice Wilkins for discovering, along with Rosalind Franklin, the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the composition of genes. Not long before they discovered DNA, it was thought that heritable traits – genes – were proteins. DNA is actually a sugar. He’s a sort of a science-king.

He’s a bit old now (83) and like many olds he’s prone to a bit of casual racism. Allegedly. A bit like your granny. We heard he was coming, and we knew it was going to be a corker. We weren’t disappointed – in the informal chat with a group of young enthusiastic scientists, he said we were all a bit scared of the chinese because there were so many of them. I’m sure that was tongue in cheek. In the ensuing questions he confirmed the importance of the legendary Eagle pub “we ate lunch there every day”. Anyone in science will point out that most interesting discoveries stem from trips to the pub or tea-breaks. Watson despaired at the lack of heating in houses in 1950s Cambridge and was amused by the etiquette “Francis had to write a letter to Maurice and Maurice had to write back before Francis would go down to London and visit Maurice’s lab”.

Watson outed himself as an atheist; I’ve not encountered many americans so vocal about not believing in god – quite something in a country that rates atheists as less trustworthy than all other people of faith. But he is a man of science and has clearly applied this to all aspects of his life. He is at least consistent. He declared that DNA is god (I’m still waiting for the Higgs Boson tbh), and his response to alternative medicine: “bulls***”. On his political leanings, he dismisses republicans in the same breath as god, though he has become increasingly irritated by the leftest camp and its embracing of woo, vegetarian hippy-ness and alternative medicine. What was noticeable was his dissmissal of the importance of protein structure and the function in life, as well as changes that were unrelated to genes such as environmental factors. He came across as someone who holds genetics in high regard, almost to the detriment of other aspects of biology.  He clearly isn’t afraid to speak his mind and doesn’t suffers fool at all; brash, but never dull, we were in for a treat.

Image: The Science Museum, Who Am I

The lecture theatre (incidentally, named after Francis Crick) was packed, there was literally nowhere left to stand. His talk was rather optimistically titled “Curing Incurable Cancer”. Becoming interested in studying cancer after his father’s younger brother died of it at a very young age, he studied under Salvador Luria at Indiana University where he was studying viruses that caused cancer. He says his PhD wasn’t in any way noteworthy, but he was reading, reading a lot, and became interested in studying genes.

Watson led the NIH side of the Human Genome Project (I might discuss this at some point, but expect it to be horrifically biased), but left over disputes relating to patenting genes. The US consortium patented genes as they were discovered, The Sanger Institute had to make their sequences publicly available. This led to what should have been a collaboration becoming highly competitive (see also “Why Craig Venter is Evil”). Watson says he left NIH because he thought DNA shouldn’t be patent. Respeck. Ten years on from sequencing the human genome, Watson sees the fruit of the project as a way to reveal the genes underlying cancer by being able to study the molecular pathways that lead to cancer. He himself was diagnosed with an easily treatable cancer, but was made further aware of how far we have to go in science’s efforts to sure cancer. During his talk he highlighted some exciting discoveries in cancer research.

Vitamin D has been show to have anti-cancer effects (though this is disputed), though the way it does this is unknown. Interestingly, some drugs used to treat heart problems, such as the foxglove derivative digoxin seems to have  beneficial effects. Watson points out that one key point in cancer is to prevent cancer spreading from the tumour around the body (metastasis). Signals that regulated the growth of blood vessels appear to be important and there are some drugs – notably Avastin – that seem to prevent cancer spreading. These drugs are still going through clinical trials, Watson was quite vocal about drug regulators  preferring people die of cancer than from drugs (I don’t entirely agree with him here), he also declared that lawyers are the enemy of civilisation (I couldn’t possibly comment).

Other situations linked to cancer are inflammation; signalling molecules released in the body during pain or inflammation – called cytokine – enhance cancer , perhaps the answer is to take a small amount of ibuprofen daily. Then again, this has not been tested in humans. The professor talk guided us back to, for me, something that was familiar territory. A protein I studied during my PhD, adenosine monophosphate activated protein kinase (AMPK). I know it as a metabolic fuel gauge; it is activated when you exercise, when the muscle cells in your body need energy, and it is switched off when you are resting or eating. Metformin is a drug used to treat diabetes, it’s off-patent and therefore comparatively cheap. When it is used in combination with normal chemotherapy drugs, it makes them more effective. He covered other developments such as targeting energy producing processes in tumour cells, and possible roles of chromosome modelling (shrug – this is where I point out I find cancer biology rather dull; it consists of studying intracellular biochemical reactions, I was trained as a physiologist . I’m glad someone is studying it, but it would drive me mad.)

James Watson forsees us (well, scientists who are interested in cancer biology) curing cancer within the next 10 years. For this to happen, scientists have to focus on actually curing cancer rather than just publishing papers (the papers published by a lab are directly linked to the ability to obtain money to run a lab.) This, he reasoned, would be doable if we put as much energy and resources into fighting cancer as we have at war…

we should get out of Afghanistan and go to war against cancer

My favourite quote – aside from the one in the title sums up James D. Watson

If we cure cancer, we’ve got another 10 years before we need to do anything else

Once we’ve dealt with cancer, we can then move on to figuring out the brain. This, he says, is what he’d research if he were entering scientific research now. Given that everyone studying cancer’s going to be out of a job in 10 years.

As one person who has had his DNA sequenced, he learned something he had suspected, while a keen consumer of ice-cream, he’d always struggled with stomach pain afterwards. the reason, it turns out he is lactose intolerant, and while he is now aware that he metabolises some drugs quite badly, his biggest concern now is that he seems to be shrinking

I do worry about being short